All eyes are on Amazon.com Inc. as the company’s search team has apparently completed its tours of 20 metro areas, including Dallas-Fort Worth, that are finalists for a second headquarters expected to bring the chosen city 50,000 high-paying jobs.

Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings declined to share specifics about Amazon’s (Nasdaq: AMZN) recent visit to North Texas, but he did tell me in an interview that the city and the Dallas Regional Chamber have hit all the deadlines that the company has set for additional information.

“I’m very impressed with the professionalism and the quality of the organization that they’ve got looking at Dallas and other places,” Rawlings said. “They’ve been everything that we could want as far as answering our questions and giving us the time to respond to their questions.”

A delegation from the Seattle-based e-commerce company recently visited the state and met with leaders in both Dallas and Austin as part of the search for a site for the project called HQ2, Gov. Greg Abbott confirmed last week.

“We believe both Austin and Dallas would be perfect fits for Amazon,” Abbott told Austin TV station KVUE during a news conference about Texas ranking as the top state for corporate relocations and expansions for the sixth year in a row, according to Site Selection magazine.

Rawlings said Abbott is highly enthusiastic about Texas’ potential to land Amazon.

“I’ve spoken to the governor myself and appreciate his support for Texas cities going after this,” Rawlings said.

Amazon has said it will pick a winner by the end of the year. The company hasn’t said whether there will be further elimination rounds along the way. The current list of 20 was winnowed from an original list of 238 bids.

Officials at the Dallas Regional Chamber and the Austin Chamber of Commerce, which submitted the regional bids on behalf of their respective metro areas, have so far declined to discuss the proposals or the process behind it.

Even as Amazon hunts for a second headquarters, not everything is rosy for its current corporate employees.

The retail giant will lay off several hundred employees at its Seattle headquarters as well as hundreds more elsewhere in a rare cutback that follows hiring freezes in some parts of the company earlier this year. The layoffs began Monday (March 12) and will continue for a few weeks.

Meanwhile the stream of conjecture about where Amazon will build its HQ2 has intensified in recent weeks.

In one recent prediction, Forbessays Washington D.C., is the favorite in part because Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post and has an expensive house in the district. A Washington D.C. address would also allow Amazon to exert much greater influence over legislation and regulation that could hinder the company’s rapid growth, Forbes argues.

The DFW-area proposal orchestrated by the Dallas Regional Chamber includes pitches from about a dozen cities and lays out more than 30 potential sites for HQ2.

Sites in downtown Dallas seemed to be the frontrunners when Amazon visited in February, sources familiar with the search said.

In addition to Dallas, Fort Worth, Frisco, Allen, Plano, Irving, Richardson, Denton, Carrollton and Westlake are among the North Texas cities believed to be represented in the DFW packet sent to Amazon.

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